Well THAT didn't last long...

I just deleted the virtual machine on which I'd installed the PDC build of Longhorn (last night), and uninstalled the Virtual PC 2004 beta. I'm not sure whether it was simply the fact of running such an early alpha on a beta VM, or if the fact that I was trying to do it on a laptop with a 4200 RPM hard drive and a slow bus (though a 2ghz P4 proc) had more to do with it, but despite having read reports of slow performance, I found running the alpha on Virtual PC to be completely unusable.

Now, I'm used to running with VMs, having used VMWare for every piece of alpha and beta software I've tested for the last 2-3 years, and I'm used to the performance sacrifices associated with this choice. But with this particular combo (and, again, I'm willing to entertain the notion that my hardware may be a contributor), the performance is excruciatingly slow. So much so that I can't imagine how long it would take to install the VS Whidbey preview and Longhorn SDK. So I'm shelving my Longhorn exploration until I can buy or put together a machine dedicated to that purpose.

Just wanted to give folks a heads-up in case you're getting ready to run the Longhorn preview. Be prepared for poor performance if you're running it in a VM, even if you've got lots of RAM (I've got 1Gb on my laptop, and devoted 512MB to the VM). And if you're running on a slow disk, it will probably be even worse. Also, I noted that each time I ran VPC, I ended up having to reboot my host PC when finished with the VM to get rid of all of the performance hiccups, even after shutting down VPC. Not surprising, given running an alpha OS on a beta VM system, but still kinda annoying.

Not trying to be overly negative here, just wanting to share my recognition that trying to do too much with too few resources isn't always the most efficient course.

UPDATE: Julie writes that she wants to “play with longhorn without installing it”. I can't say as I blame her, but I want to be clear that I'm not recommending that people avoid installing the Longhorn PDC bits, just that they have realistic expectations about performance, particularly when running on a VM. Just because I don't currently have the hardware resources available to make that acceptable doesn't mean it's not possible, and I sure wouldn't want to spoil anyone's fun playing with the cool new bits. That said, Julie may be onto something.

8 Comments

  • I had the same experience with the VM on my laptop. In the end I've made my old PIII 550 WinXP desktop a dual-boot with Longhorn and while it's still slow (it's a beta) it's much, much faster than inside VM.

  • I'm seeing pretty bad performance on my 2.4Ghz 1GB machine as well (running in VPC w/512MB dedicated). I wonder if it's a memory or processor thing. My "server" is a Win2003 box running at 800Mhz, but with 2GB of RAM. I'm considering trying VPC on there and giving Longhorn 1GB of RAM.



    Unfortunately, though, I think my WinFS is messed up, so I may have to do a complete reinstall. The last one took ~7 hours (LH, VS.NET, etc., etc), so I'm not looking forward to it. Oh well.

  • My laptop's running Win2003 (for now) Server, with VPC 2004, with Longhorn inside. 1GB ram, 2.4GHz proc. Very, very slow but for dev on the go, it's usable. My home pc, which I don't mind wiping every now and again, runs Longhorn pretty speedy. It's a 2.6Ghz, with 1gb of 333Mhz ram, and an ATI all-in-wonder 8500. Longhorn on that rivals windows 2000 on my 1.6GHz box at work. The only major difference is the huge loadtime for the start bar as I log on.

  • I'm waiting for the video!

  • Add me to the list of tried it...didn't work worth a crap.



    Hard drive speed I'd say is the number one factor for slow performance. The way it stores things in a virtual disk (a file) slows things down.



    Running on my test machine (once I got it setup) went really well and decently fast (and hour or two for LongHorn and an hour or so for Whidbey) except for the part where LongHorn says it should take about 10 minutes *cough*1 hour*cough* to detect the hardware configuration ;)



    I'm using Virtual PC for another WinXP install on my main XP machine and a Win2K3 install and they're slow, but definitely acceptable.

  • Did you guys make sure to 1) compact the VPC HD image and then 2) defrag the physical drive that image was created on? VPC dynamically expands the disk, which means it has to allocate new space for the HD each time which can result in a terribly fragmented VPC HD image file. Try the above (in order) and you should get some better performance.



    HTH,

    Drew



    P.S. I'm not saying it's gonna BLAZING FAST after that, but I got a noticeable boost. ;)

  • Hey Drew,



    I did a defrag, including system files and free space consolidation, prior to installing VPC and Longhorn. I had more than 12Gb of free space, at least 6Gb of which was contiguous. Given that the VM for Longhorn was less than 3Gb when I deleted it, I don't think fragmentation was an issue for me. But as Erik (HumanCompiler) pointed out, the (lack of) speed of my hard drive could be reason enough for the poor perf. One of these days I'm going to just drop some bucks on a 7200RPM HD for my laptop, but today isn't that day. :-(

  • Gerrard,



    I'm pretty sure I didn't use the checked build, but I will definitely double-check that before I install it on the new Dell I've got on the way. Thanks for the reminder!

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